For a show that's often been criticized for painfully slow pacing, there was no shortage of action in the Walking Dead's recent Season 4 finale. Our heroes arrived at a survivor camp called Terminus, a rumored safe haven that was teased all season long. But unlike the show's previous settings—say Hershel's farm, the Prison, or Woodbury—no time was wasted. Incumbent introductions gave way to gunfire within a single episode.

It's the first time The Walking Dead moved beyond walker-speed through a location since Season 1, when the survivors stumbled in and exploded out of the Atlanta-area CDC within a single hour. But there's a key difference between the show at these two plot points, one which makes following the series going forward feel like a chore.

No one on The Walking Dead cares about understanding what the hell is going on anymore.

Dead people walking + unknowns = zombie fic

Different from the Haitian voodoo variety, pop-culture zombies started as cultural commentary, an analogy for whatever mindless, rapidly spreading thing was taking over the population. That very purpose is rooted in understanding—trend X is sweeping the nation, let's depict the struggle to figure it out in the face of its potential danger. The very best zombie films of the past 15 years get this, each incorporating the pursuit of understanding in some unique way.

Take 28 Days Later, where the basic plot is driven by curiosity. The zombie virus (called rage in the film) jumps to humans in a lab where scientists study chimps suffering from its bloodlust characteristics. And after the apocalypse begins, the four survivors the film follows constantly push on, hoping to find a military base broadcasting messages of safety and cures. You can probably guess how that turns out (the military's grasp on the virus is limited at best, and the zombie they're "studying" isn't helpful in the end), but the plot is unquestionably propelled by the survivors' desire to understand what's going on around them. (The film's radical alternative ending only furthers the necessity of understanding—as the four survivors eschew the military and find a scientist who offers them a true, albeit seemingly fatal, solution.)

You can nearly copy and paste the paragraph above for World War Z, the highest grossing zombie film in the US during this modern zombie renaissance. The role of understanding is even deeper here, though, as Brad Pitt's character hops from global organization to organization chasing pieces of a cure-puzzle he only puts together in the end. And unlike 28 Days Later, World War Z takes the idea of pursuing knowledge all the way to true solutions—even if those come with concerns and a daunting timetable.

This crucial bit of zombie fiction DNA isn't even limited to the genre's traditional films. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun and Ed discover the means to fend off the undead through TV news reports (theoretically seekers of knowledge), and the film's ending is entirely based on the premise that understanding a zombie apocalypse is feasible. Like World War Z, the revelation makes it possible for life to truly move forward in the end. Zombieland is less scientific and more practical in analyzing the apocalypse—Tallahassee and Columbus survive essentially because they develop an ongoing list of experiential-based survival rules to restore some order to the chaos around them.

Brains are eaten, not really used

This all brings us back to The Walking Dead, arguably the most important (inarguably the biggest) zombie franchise nowadays. At one point, this show knew how to handle its understanding too.

Beyond the quick rendezvous at the CDC (where the shacked-up scientist kept studying, but failing to find, zombie solutions), the show's most memorable moments are all wrapped in evolving knowledge. The giant reveal in Season 2, for instance, came after Rick dispatches Shane... only to discover that you turn into a zombie when you die, bitten or not. And over time, the survivors have found a number of awesome zombie hacks—Glen and Rick cover themselves in zombie guts in Season 1 to escape a horde; Michonne walks slowly with two walkers on leashes to camouflage while traveling. You can say what you will about the overall effectiveness of the Governor as a big bad, but even he strived to solve this zombie problem. His lair was filled with fishtanks of zombie heads, and he employed a brains-guy named Milton to conduct experiments on whether zombies could retain any human characteristics.

"Once you get into environments like the CDC—kind of a no brainer—or Woodbury, which is safe and quiet to a certain extent, you would be able to have a lab and start to discover things," series creator Robert Kirkman told Ars at the time. "It’s the nature of man to want to find answers, and that's something people would definitely focus on. We’re trying to portray it as realistically as possible through Milton."

One season later and the show doesn't value understanding anymore. The lone manifestation of science currently is an obvious mulleted red herring named Eugene. The fact that the competent military man (another new character this season, Abraham) is convinced Eugene has zombie answers for Washington instantly destroys his credibility too. You'd imagine that as our survivors became more adept at navigating the day-to-day over time (which, to the show's credit, they have), some of them would turn their attention to a few big-picture ideas. Instead, it's constantly up to new faces to assume this role (the Governor, Milton, now Eugene) in a series of quickly diminishing returns. And to make matters worse, our survivors have reached a level of zombie efficiency where even those former micro bits of learning have vanished.

"Safe and quiet to a certain extent," Terminus perfectly fits Kirkman's definition of when understanding should re-enter a zombie world. It's advertised to both characters and audience as some type of safe haven, but not one inch of it indicates that the residents care about figuring this apocalypse thing out. In that sense, it's not worth using as a giant plot set piece. Good riddance. The show may have rushed in and out of the CDC quickly for non-narrative reasons (a first-season show without a guaranteed second will often rush plot and can't spend much on expensive sets), but the speed of escalation at Terminus highlights The Walking Dead's new priorities—action, and not much substance beyond that.

The French have a smarter undead fix—The Returned

When zombie stories are no longer about understanding the zombies and the new zombie world, it's time to move on. The Walking Dead seems to care more about bloodshed, the possible evil nature of man, and ruin porn-ish themes you can get everywhere from military narratives to Law and Order. What sets the zombie genre apart and ultimate characterizes it (beyond that surfacey detail of dead people walking) is trying to understand a mass cultural movement and the changed society it creates.

So don't let the major network knock-off (ABC's Resurrection) scare you away, Sundance's The Returned is the real deal. Even though the French sci-fi series isn't traditional zombie fare—there are no green brain-eaters—this is the academic's best bet for finding current undead satisfaction.

The show's premise is a clever alteration of the dead rising: individuals who were thought dead (many in gruesome fashion) begin coming back to their small mountainside town without having aged. The returned don't show any immediately alarming characteristics—they're hungry but eat what's in the fridge; they don't stand out in a crowd due to physical appearance; they talk like others talk and can remember most of their previous lives (besides what happens after each accident of course).

Beyond the anticipation of finding what these "people" are and what they may be capable of, watching how everyone else reacts is gripping. Since the returned can be just about anyone (we see children, single twins, grooms who never made it to the altar, doctors, and more), the show can explore how virtually every kind of basic relationship copes with zombification. And beyond the interpersonal navigation, the town (at times collectively, many times as individuals) wants to get to the bottom of this phenomenon. Responses to the returned run the gamut from full acceptance to fear, solution-searching through religion to secret observation. Frankly, it's the exact opposite of The Walking Dead—void of instant-gratification kills and focused instead on learning the "how," "why," and "what next" of living with the undead. It's by far the liveliest story in today's dead landscape.

The Walking Dead is beginning to fail its fans by neglecting an essential part of the zombie world. It's not an immediate death sentence for the show—it's so popular a spin-off is coming—but there's a declining marginal utility for cheap thrills and kills. If what interested you in the genre are its brains and not the process of eating them, it's time to think it through. Season 1 of The Returned is now streaming on Netflix. And instead of more Rick and company this fall, Season 2 of The Returned should come to Sundance roughly around that time.